Ukraine Reminds Us Necessity Is Still the Mother of Invention

“History books will show,” concludes Adm. Rob Bauer, chief of Norway’s armed forces and chairman of NATO’s military committee, “Ukraine has transformed modern warfare.” To keep Cold War 2.0 from turning into something far worse, the United States and its allies must learn from Ukraine’s clever and creative warriors.

Perhaps most transformative has been Ukraine’s ability to maximize the lethality of all manner of unmanned systems. Ukraine’s war of self-defense illustrates that drones are no longer auxiliary to other weapons systems, no longer exotic luxuries wielded solely by high-tech militaries. What was foreshadowed in the Islamic State’s off-the-shelf drone swarms and Azerbaijan’s deployment of unmanned systems has taken center stage in Ukraine.

Ukraine will produce or procure 200,000 drones in 2023 alone—some as big as planes, some as small as a lunchbox, some made of plastic or cardboard. The Ukrainian military includes units such as the Achilles Company, which deploys kamikaze-drone swarms to overwhelm Russian targets. In addition, there’s Aerorozvidka—a group founded by Ukrainian techies—that builds customized killer drones. Aerorozvidka played a key role stopping the 40-mile-long Russian column on the approaches to Kiev early in the war, and its engineers continue to churn out innovative unmanned and robotic systems for the war effort, including the night-stalking R18. According to Aerorozvidka, every dollar spent on an R18 delivers $670 in Russian losses.

Indeed, by modifying off-the shelf drones—at an estimated total cost of $2,000 per unit—Ukrainian forces have killed thousands of Russian personnel and taken out scores of multi-million-dollar Russian tanks. Ukraine’s drone units have utilized 3-D printing to produce bombs light enough to airdrop from consumer-use drones—but lethal enough to cripple tanks. They have turned jet skis into kamikaze-drones. They have used drones in swarming attacks, as loitering airborne artillery, in attacks on Russian infrastructure in occupied Ukraine, in jarring long-range attacks against Moscow and longer-range attacks against Russian targets as far away as Sudan, and in spectacular seaborne operations against Russian warships. With a 600-mile range, Ukraine’s torpedo-like unmanned underwater vehicles bring most of the Black Sea within reach. And at a cost of $250,000, Ukraine’s uncrewed sea vehicles are a tiny fraction of the cost of the massive warships, cargo ships and bridges they have destroyed. More important, these systems have enabled a country that basically has no navy to decimate Russia’s navy—and tether it to port.

As we trudge into the “foothills” of Cold War 2.0, America’s military, government and populace not only must learn from Ukraine’s creativity, but also must summon the stamina of a superpower and the agility of a startup.

Some of us warned long ago that America’s monopoly on unmanned systems—and dominance in unmanned warfare—were time-limited. Americans must recognize that just as these weapons systems and tactics can be employed against our adversaries, they can—and will—be employed against us. Gen. Christopher Cavoli—double-hatted as commander of U.S. European Command and NATO supreme allied commander—reports that “one-way attack” drones have produced “huge results on the battlefield” for both Ukraine and Russia. Inexpensive and difficult to detect, a small attack drone “gives people a feeling of insecurity on the other side,” Cavoli observes. “It’s not just that you got hit with the drone, it’s that you kind of didn’t hear it coming…it fills you with dread,” leaving behind “a paralytic effect.”

There are signs the U.S. military is making needed adjustments. On the defensive side of the spectrum, the Pentagon has stood up an office devoted to countering uncrewed systems. Pentagon industry partner Raytheon has developed a scalable, mobile, rapidly deployable laser weapons system that “detects, tracks, identifies and defeats swarming, asymmetric threats.” The system can be loaded onto the back of a pickup truck, slung onto attack helicopters, mated to Stryker AFVs or even crammed into special-ops tactical vehicles.

On the offensive side of the spectrum, the Pentagon is developing warplane-borne microdrones that can attack independent targets, swarm targets or even lie in wait for targets. The Pentagon’s newly minted Replicator initiative aims to field “attritable autonomous systems at scale of multiple thousands,” the Pentagon recently revealed. Plus, Task Force 59 is demonstrating the effectiveness of unmanned systems in the Persian Gulf, even as American unmanned ships are now on duty in the Indo-Pacific.

Finally, if the metastasizing missile and killer-drone arsenals of Iran, Hezbollah, China and North Korea haven’t gotten the attention of U.S. policymakers, hopefully Russia’s missile and kamikaze-drone onslaught has. Russia’s missile barrages emphatically illustrate that missile defense must become an integral part of America’s security. And Ukraine’s layered missile defenses illustrate that region-wide missile defense is feasible. It is simply a matter of will.

America’s military has shown glimpses of the sort of creativity that’s needed to deter the axis of autocracy: Army artillery and Marine rockets affixed to Navy ships, F-35Bs crammed onto amphibs, U.S. fighter-jets flying off allied carriers, hot-pit bomber stops in India and Finland, not-so-secret troop deployments, landings and dockings in Taiwan. America’s military will need to be even more creative, more agile, more improvisational to keep freedom’s foes at bay in the years to come: manned-unmanned teaming in the skies and on the seas, cargo planes refashioned into airborne arsenal-ships, left-of-launch cyberstrikes to preempt missile attacks, lily-pad bases in the frigid Arctic and steamy South China Sea, Marines and commandos deployed on commercial vessels, nimble collaborations with industry to reshape the battlespace, U.S. and allied territories bristling with anti-ship and anti-air systems to remind Beijing and Moscow that two can play the A2/AD game.

More broadly, as my Sagamore colleague Capt. Jerry Hendrix argues, Washington must “recognize that its predictability has turned into a weapon that is being used against it.” So, “Instead of climbing one rung up the escalation ladder during strategic standoffs, climb two every now and then. Make the enemy guess.”

Yet the adjustments needed to deter the axis of autocracy and weather Cold War 2.0 must extend beyond tactics and strategy, beyond the Pentagon’s walls, beyond weapons systems.

Russia has targeted Ukraine’s government, population centers, food supply, transportation system, energy sector, cyber systems, and communications links. China has cut supply chains that feed Japan’s industry and severed undersea cables that connect Taiwan with the world. Thanks to foreign assistance and a national ethos of resiliency, Ukraine has withstood Russia’s onslaught. Likewise, resiliency and allied support have helped Japan and Tawain work around China’s provocations.

During the Cold War, America grafted resiliency into a national security strategy: The highway system would serve a dual purpose in a time of war. Civil-defense programs were in place at the state and local level. Continuity-of-government protocols were rehearsed. Mountain hideaways, ships and planes were on call to serve as backup command-and-control nodes. Signaling to Moscow that America was prepared to soldier on—even through a nuclear attack—reinforced America’s deterrent strategy. Yet 21st-century equivalents to that sort of resiliency—mechanical and analog backups for digital systems, critical infrastructure hardened against EMP attack, vaccines and therapeutics prepositioned for emergency distribution, updated continuity-of-government procedures, systems to identify and counter deepfakes, backup power generation and water purification—are lacking.

One step in the right direction is Victus Nox, a Space Force initiative that allows the Pentagon to rapidly deliver satellites into orbit in the event of enemy attack. Another is the Pentagon’s emerging constellation of regional microchip-manufacturing hubs. Other government agencies—along with industry—should follow these examples, devote resources to resiliency and develop whole-of-society initiatives to prepare for worst-case scenarios.

Creativity and adaptivity are part of what America is. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in the 1830s, “Americans always display a clear, free, original and inventive power of the mind.”

That was evident during the War for Independence, when Americans employed asymmetric tactics on land and at sea to outlast a tyrant superpower; during the Civil War, when Americans innovated rapid-fire guns, submarines and armor-plated ships; during World War II, which saw Americans at the outset use Navy aircraft carriers to launch Army bombers into the skies over Tokyo, and at the end fuse their military-industrial-intellectual-scientific-technological capabilities to split the atom; during the Korean War, when Americans swung around and behind North Korea’s massive invasion force, landed 70,000 troops at Inchon, and rescued South Korea from the prison yard of communism. Yet America's special brand of creativity doesn't always manifest itself with bullets and bombs. When Stalin tried to squeeze the allies out of Berlin, Americans blended the principles of strategic bombing with the efficiency and ingenuity of a Detroit assembly line to sustain West Berlin and win the first battle of the Cold War.

Ukraine is waging and winning the first battle of Cold War 2.0. Winning the next—and keeping Cold War 2.0 from boiling over—will demand more resiliency and creativity from Americans.

Alan W. Dowd is a senior fellow with the Sagamore Institute, where he leads the Center for America’s Purpose.